Warfare · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with a face. Someone in the platoon is looking at something off to the side, and you never get the reverse shot. A wall. A doorway. The back of a man's head. You wait for the camera to swing around and show you what he sees, the way war movies always do, and it doesn't. That withheld reverse is the whole film. Mendoza and Garland have built a war picture out of the thing combat actually consists of — not knowing, looking and not seeing, hearing something land and not knowing whose it was.

Deleuze had a name for what happens when a character can no longer turn perception into action. He called the war film's natural engine the action-image: a soldier sees a situation, acts on it, the act changes the situation, and the cut carries you forward on that chain. Omaha Beach in 'Saving Private Ryan' runs on it at full throttle — Spielberg's handheld camera shakes inside the chaos, but it always finds the relevant thing, and Tom Hanks always has the next move. 'Warfare' inherits that camera, the eye-level body-level posture Spielberg invented, and then cuts the engine. The SEALs are the most trained agents imaginable, and for most of the runtime the situation will not resolve to anything they can do. They are pinned. They wait for evac. They look.

This is what Deleuze meant by the crisis of the action-image: the moment the sensory-motor circuit jams, when what a character perceives no longer tells them what to do. And out of that jam he watched a different kind of image come loose — the pure optical and sound situation, the opsign and the sonsign. The screen stops being a space you cross and becomes a space you endure. The protagonist becomes what Deleuze called a voyant, a seer: not an agent, a watcher. There is a long stretch of 'Warfare' where the most important thing a Navy SEAL does is listen. That is not a failure of the war film. It is the war film discovering its own time-image.

And here the sonsign does the heavy lifting, because this film thinks through your ears. Critics singled out the sound as the most rigorously real in modern combat cinema, and what makes it real is not loudness — it's information that arrives with no picture attached. The difference between fire coming in and fire going out. The specific timbre of one weapon at one distance. The ringing derangement after a blast, where the mix goes wrong on purpose. Come and See taught cinema that acoustic horror could carry a war without a single bar of score, and 'Warfare' takes that lesson to its end point: there is essentially no music, no emotional instruction track, nothing telling you how to feel. The sound is a sonsign in Deleuze's strict sense — a sound situation you can only suffer, detached from any image that would master it.

Notice what the editing refuses. Since the late nineties, combat footage has meant rhythmic intensification: faster cuts toward the peak, then release. 'Warfare' holds a near-uniform tempo and sits inside duration. This is dead time — temps mort — the stretches where nothing advances, the everyday simply held, and it is exhausting in the exact way sustained stress is exhausting, because the film never hands you the conventional signal that a sequence is over. United 93 built the template — real people, real time, an ensemble with no protagonist, no retrospective meaning imposed — and Greengrass still shaped toward catharsis. 'Warfare' withholds even that.

The house is the other discovery. A real family's home, occupied as an overwatch position, and the family is simply there — at the edges of the frame, never explained, never given an interiority the film can resolve into a Western arc. Deleuze would call the place an any-space-whatever: a space that has stopped being a setting for action and become a pure affective fragment, sun-bleached, indifferent, cut down to whatever wall or doorway the body is pressed against. The SEALs lose their sight-lines as the camera loses them; the overview that situates you in a normal war film is gone. The space disconnects into pieces you cannot assemble into a map.

There is one more turn, and it is where the film earns its strangeness. The whole thing is reconstructed from memory — Mendoza was there, and the script is built from his recall and the recall of the men beside him. So the camera is not neutral; it is a free indirect vision, the author's eye and the soldiers' eye fused, the platoon caught in the act of telling their own day. Deleuze called this fabulation: people legending themselves, not into heroes but into witnesses, making a true account out of an experience that had no shape while it was happening. Zero Dark Thirty already provoked the argument 'Warfare' walks straight into — whether refusing to editorialize is itself a moral position. The film's answer is to make witness the only available act.

What did it move forward? The American war film has spent twenty-five years getting closer to the body and louder in the ear, from Black Hawk Down's procedural machine to The Hurt Locker's vocational patience. 'Warfare' is where that lineage stops pretending the camera can save you with a reverse shot. It hands the war film over to time — to looking, listening, and waiting — and trusts that the truest thing it can do is refuse to tell you what it means. Watch it loud, in the dark. Then notice how much of what you 'saw' you only heard.